Where you’ll find me and where I’ve spoken

Hello. I’m Chrys Wu. I’m also known as MacDiva (remember the days of handles?) and I’m from the internet. You can also find me at the following events, though the ones in 2015 are subject to change. Those where I spoke or hosted are in purple. Note this is not a comprehensive list.

Over the years, I’ve been asked to present and teach about journalism, coding, collaboration and culture. If you’d like me to bring my unique perspective to your event, contact me.

Every year, the NICAR links lista> is a testament to the collective spirit of the investigative reporting community. This year, in addition to compiling the list, I moderated a discussion with engineer Ricardo Brom (La Nacíon, Argentina), Tyler Dukes (WRAL News, Raleigh, NC) and Tania Montalvo (Animal Politico, Mexico) that was "All About the Analysis" and offered guidance during the career roundtable

FITC organizers extended an invitation to give a talk about this year's theme, "Level up." Since I do a lot of "backstage" work to help large groups of people do just that, I decided to write a new talk called "Everyday Transformative Powers". The quasi-transcript is on my site.

This is one of my favorite conferences of the year. I love it for its camaraderie and opportunities to learn. This year I'm speaking on a panel about bridging the journalist-developer gap. I'm also collecting NICAR tutorials, presentations and resources on my blog.

The founder of Chicas Poderosas asked me to give an inspirational opening keynote for the inaugural gathering of Chicas Poderosas in Miami. The audience was mostly from Latin America: journalists (many of whom have never written code before), developers (many who'd never worked with journalists before) and other professionals who'd never attended a hack event of this kind. Read the slides (in Spanish).

Had things turned out differently, I might have become a research librarian/information scientist. So it was an honor to be asked to give the keynote speech for the Ontario Library Association's annual conference on research, learning, accessibility and usability associated with technology in libraries. (Slides)

The Robot Film Festival returned to San Francisco to celebrate short films about (and sometimes by) robots. Our partners at Bot & Dolly (the design & engineering company that made the movie "Gravity" possible) have been tremendous.

Montréal has quite a few professionals who work in information visualization and dataviz. I put my figurative NYT hat on and showed the ways in which we use visualization at The New York Times — and not just in our visual reporting. I showed some of the visualization tools we've created internally to better understand our readers and discover patterns in data. It was my first presentation in French, and hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do that again. Read the slides.

This was the final bow for a heartfelt conference of independent iOS and Mac OS developers. My favorite talk, tech-and-design nerd that I am, was by Dave Addey, who talked about the ways type and design in film have shaped our collective impression of "we are in the future now." His blog, "Typeset In The Future is dedicated to fonts in sci-fi. When (if?) his talk is uploaded to Vimeo, you should watch it.

Who doesn't love space? AMNH developed The Digital Universe, a complete and accurate 3D atlas of the cosmos. As a piece of software, it is tremendously compact and fast. But it's also a complicated and foreign interface for the layperson. The museum decided to invite the public to explore the stars and come up with new tools, educational means, interfaces and visualizations. It's the first overnight hackathon I've been to in many years and it was awesome.

Write/Speak/Code is a 3-day, action-oriented for women developers. Each day is dedicated to a full day of training, mentoring and coaching women in thought leadership, technical conference speaking, and open-source code contribution. I am proud to be one of the founders of this event and I'm moderating the Devs Write panel.

For the first time, the Goruco organizing committee has explicitly committed itself to gender diversity. As part of that effort, I was asked to join the advisory board, and I'm actively seeking women speakers. Get in touch if you'd like to share your Ruby specific or development-related experience at the conference. For a taste of past talks, head to the video page.

I am on the SXSW Accelerator Board and constantly looking for new innovations and startup ideas for the 2013 pitch competition and beyond. This year, it's great to see competitors from outside the usual hubs in California and New York and Boston.

NICAR is probably the best learning/tutorial conference for people interested in investigative journalism. It's very hands-on, and the journalists and trainers are great. I've collected slides, presentations and tutorials from previous NICAR conferences for everyone to learn from, and I've did the same in 2013.

I hosted Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA12, a hack day for journalists, designers and developers interested in advancing what’s possible in online news. A lot of great projects came out of the event and people made new professional ties — always a bonus in an industry that swaps and trades talent almost as fast as the MLB does.

White House Safety Datapalooza

Sept. 14

Washington, DC

The White House CTO’s office invited me to give a "TED-style talk" about data journalism, which was live-streamed to the public. (Transcript)

My talk "Amazing People Doing Awesome Things" focused on collaboration between coders and non-coders, and the importance of working in concert even if you’re capable of completing a project alone.

SXSW Interactive

March 9-12

Austin, TX

To me, this conference is massive to the point of being overwhelming. When things got to be too much, I took a tip from Michael Lopp ("Rands in Repose") and decided to put myself in a public place with a friend or two and let people know about it. This, like Michael’s writing, worked brilliantly.

NICAR

Feb. 23

St. Louis, MO

This is one of the best hands-on conferences for journalists interested in investigative and data-driven reporting. I collected slides, presentations and tutorials and they’re an abundant trove to learn from.

SparkCamp: Data

Jan. 13-15

Austin, TX

About 80 journalists gathered at this invite-only unconference to talk about the many facets of data: how to get it, how to clean it, how to interrogate it, how to test it, and how to present it. What I liked most was the number of people who came from outside the journalism world. Here are the top 10 things one attendee learned from the event.

This was a truly extraordinary design conference, and as I understand it, organizer Andy McMillan is the primary reason it exists. He did a tremendous job arranging a mix of workshops, film screenings and presentations, and the speakers, particularly Wilson Miner and Craig Mod, were breathtaking.

I hosted Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 along with Hacks/Hackers Boston organizer Matt Carroll and Phillip Smith of the Mozilla Foundation. The 40-some journalists participating came up with several projects, including an easy-to-use interactive bar chart generator, a PDF inspector, and a way to find your own trending topics on Twitter.

NYC Python powerhouse Gloria Willadsen invited me to speak about coders, non-coders and community. You can watch some of the conference presentations here.

Social Media Workshop, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Aug. 19

New York, NY

I taught fundamental social media skills, tips and techniques to the incoming class of graduate students.

Moby Dick Project

July 29

Stanford, CA

From the mind of Ben Huh came this one-day hack fest that was more about innovation and design than coding. And that was awesome. I worked with a small team to come up with a possible solution to delivering the news you want given specific time constraints.

I joined roboticists Heather Knight and Marek Michalowski to produce the first-ever short film festival dedicated to celebrating robot-human interaction. The two-day extravaganza included film screenings, a family filmmaking workshop, cocktail parties, a robot red carpet, and live performances during the awards ceremony. Watch the films.

I met a guy at a BreadPig hackathon and we built a Lego Mindstorms robot that fought valiantly in a sumo tournament. I only wish I knew Python at the time so we could have included more sophisticated programming. (Impedance!) Watch the final battle.

2010

NewsFoo

Dec. 3-5

Phoenix, AZ

Along with Adaptive Path chief creative officer Jesse James Garrett, I led a discussion on improving user experience in online news.

Hacks/Hackers NYC’s second hackathon turned out to be its most ambitious to date. I co-hosted an overnight hackathon with a theme of making New York easier to understand for its residents. My team’s contribution: The New York City Roach Map. (It continues to update every week!)

Having founded and led ONA’s social media efforts at the 2007 conference, I decided this was to be my fourth and final as the social media point person. I conducted all of the strategic planning for sponsorship, social media marketing leading up to the conferences, and element integration. During the conference, I did curation and live-tweeting on the @ONA10 account, managed several live blogging volunteers, and coordinated with the live stream team to ensure complete real-time coverage of the conference, which broke all previous registered attendance records.

I closed the advanced social media session a day after attendees had crammed the rooms of the beginner and intermediate panels. Of all the public presentations I’ve given, this is the one people bring up most often.

I was a mentor for UNITY’s inaugural journalism startup bootcamp, NewU, and also spoke to the group about user engagement and social marketing. There’s an element of competition between the mentor-protégé teams, and I’m very proud of my mentee, Toan Lam, who won the AAJA prize for his business idea, Go Inspire Go.

I was on a "Feedback & Foresight" panel with Roger Black, Roger Fidler, Jeff Jarvis and Rick Robinson. Each of us was asked to posit, parry and predict where the media industry was headed and what consumers would be doing now that the iPad had been released.

I led a practical session about "Harnessing the Power of Social Media." My talk was counter-scheduled against one by my friend William Couch, who has made the shift from designer at USA Today to front-end engineer at Twitter. William is hugely talented, and I was worried I’d be talking to an empty room. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. And people still tell me how much they got out of my talk. That’s gratifying.